BOOKS OF THE TIMES

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Published: March 30, 1987

ONE has come to expect extreme forms of narrative sleight of hand from the English novelist Julian Barnes. In his highly original ''Flaubert's Parrot'' (1985), he wrote about a man obsessed with Gustave Flaubert, and by encyclopedically evoking the great French novelist and identifying himself with the husband of Mme. Bovary, the author managed almost to become Flaubert.

In ''Before She Met Me'' - an earlier work that was published in this country after the successful appearance here of ''Flaubert's Parrot'' - he mixed comedy and melodrama in a story about a man who becomes obsessively jealous of his own wife's past. (Mr. Barnes's first novel, ''Metroland,'' about growing up bohemian in London and Paris, has just been issued here for the first time, in a paperback edition by McGraw-Hill.) So it comes as a slight surprise that Mr. Barnes's latest novel, ''Staring at the Sun,'' is a relatively straightforward narrative about a lower-middle-class Englishwoman named Jean Serjeant who lives from the 1920's into the 2020's. To borrow the story's central metaphor, it traces her life from the sunrise to sunset.

Yet if this new book lacks the artistic trickiness of its predecessors, there is a quieter game being played in its pages. That game lies in the language, with words and phrases echoing musically throughout the novel until the homeliest of phrases is raised up to a kind of poetry. Thus the expression ''staring at the sun'' begins by referring to what an R.A.F. fighter pilot does when he is flying east at the crack of dawn, and ends up meaning the contemplation of death.

The medium of this language is Jean Serjeant, whom we first meet as a 7 year old, wondering why the potted hyacinth sprouts her Uncle Leslie has given her for Christmas are refusing to grow. The opposite of Emma Bovary, she lacks all sense of romance, and endures so long that her son grows old before her eyes, and memories race ''across her sky like Irish weather.''

Every person in the book relates to Jean: her mother, who wants her to throw out the hyacinths; her father, who takes her up in a plane to cure her whooping cough; her Uncle Leslie, who plays golf with her; her husband, Michael, who bullies her until she finally leaves him after 20 years of marriage; her son, Gregory, who goes on living near her into his old age; her son's friend Rachel, who wants to sleep with her, and Tommy Prosser, the R.A.F. pilot who first tells her about staring into the sun.

And every word relates to Jean, who like the young Stephen Dedalus likes to think about language until it yields up all its hidden meanings. She thinks about how the pilot described flying at night: the instrument lights ''have to be red - red's the only colour that works,'' he says. ''So you see, it's all black and red up there.'' She thinks about the colors the first time her husband sleeps with her. ''She lay there in the dark, thinking about blood. Black and red, black and red - the colours of Prosser's universe. Perhaps they were the only colours in the world when you came down to it.''

Later her son, Gregory, contemplating God and death, recalls Pascal's description of belief as being a wager: ''If you didn't bet, you couldn't win. Put your money on red, put your money on black - there were only two choices.'' Will Jean Serjeant choose red or black? we are made to wonder.

Some of Mr. Barnes's wordplay is amusing, like Jean's question to her father ''about this new woman prime minister of Austria called Ann Schluss,'' or the graffito that the lesbian Rachel cites: ''Three wise men - are you serious?'' Some of it gets tedious, like Gregory's debates with himself over ''the God question,'' or his interviews, in the 21st century, with a function of the General Purposes Computer called TAT, or The Absolute Truth: ''Is it true that man is the only animal capable of suicide?'' ''Yes. Lemmings are disqualified. But there are two ways of looking at it. Man is also the only animal endowed with the capacity to decline to commit suicide.'' In fact, as Jean and Gregory move deeper into the 21st century, the novel itself bogs down a bit.

But at its best, it makes the back of your neck prickle. When Jean finally digs up the hyacinth sprouts that her eccentric Uncle Leslie has given her, she finds that they are ''four upturned wooden golf tees.'' Later, after the disappointment of her marriage, she feels she has discovered ''all the secrets of life.'' They were: ''Four slim ochre points. Golf tees. . . . Only a child would take them for hyacinths. Only a child would expect them to sprout.''

As for her choosing black or red: ''Of course religion was piffle; of course death was absolute,'' she concludes. At the end of the book she takes another flight in an airplane, not to cure the whooping cough, but to see the setting sun. ''She did not . . . give it any sign of greeting. She did not smile, and she tried very hard not to blink. The sun's descent seemed quicker this time, a smooth slipping away. The earth did not greedily chase it, but lay flatly back with its mouth open. The big orange sun settled on the horizon, yielded a quarter of its volume to the accepting earth, then a half, then three-quarters, and then, easily, without argument, the final quarter. For some minutes a glow continued from beneath the horizon, and Jean did, at last, smile towards this postmortal phosphorescence. Then the aeroplane turned away, and they began to lose height.''